2007 Turkish GP facts and stats

The Turkish Grand Prix might not have been a thriller but it was a pot-boiler of a result for the world championship – the top four drivers coming home in the reverse of their championship positions closed things up nicely.

Here are the facts and statistics from the Turkish Grand Prix.

Felipe Massa scored his fifth career win. His victory also means that the four drivers battling for the championship have three wins each.

The only other driver still mathematically capable of winning the championship is Nick Heidfeld.

Massa and Lewis Hamilton have scored all their wins this year from pole position.

Massa and team mate Kimi Raikkonen swapped third place in the drivers’ championship for the fourth race in a row. They are separated by one point, giving the Ferrari management no clear reason to favour one driver over another.

Hamilton has started from the front row of the grid eight times, more than any other drivers. He has the best average starting position of any driver (2.83), followed by Alonso (3.33).

Heikki Kovalainen overtook team mate Giancarlo Fisichella in the points standings. He has eight points finishes to Fisichella’s six.

Fernando Alonso marked his 100th participation in a Grand Prix weekend. In that time he has scored 18 wins and 18 seconds places, plus nine third and nine fourth places. He has failed to start twice: at Indianapolis in 2005 along with every other Michelin driver, and he did not take the restart in the 2001 Belgian Grand Prix having suffered gearbox failure on the first lap.

Mercedes commemorated the occasion by giving him a model of the W196 race car that Juan Manuel Fangio used to win four races in 1954. Ron Dennis said of the bulky gift: “We thought we would give you something heavy to throw at us…”

Only one driver retired from the race – Mark Webber – on the day before his 31st birthday. Adrian Sutil’s car stopped before the flag but he was classified. (read more on reliability in F1 over the past decade).

Alonso continued his unbroken run of points finishes this year. He has scored in the last 15 races in a row.

McLaren and Ferrari will have scored 300 points between them if McLaren are allowed to keep their points from Hungary. The maximum points they could have scored between them in this time is 348, which underlines their domination of the season so far.